People We Meet on Vacation Emily Henry (unputdownable books txt) 📖

East Linfield library, Alex says. I was setting up my classroom and I remembered they have yearbooks.

You have defied my trust, I joke. I’m texting your brothers for baby pictures right now.

Right away, he sends back that same Sad Puppy shot from Friday, his face blurry and washed out, the hazy orange glow of a streetlight visible over his shoulder. Mean, he writes.

Is that a stock photo that you keep saved for occasions such as these? I ask.

No, he says. Took it Friday.

You were out pretty late for Linfield, I say. What’s open apart from Frisch’s Big Boy at that hour?

It turns out that once you’re 21 there’s plenty to do after dark in Linfield, he says. I was at Birdies.

Birdies, the golf-themed dive bar “and grill” across the street from my high school.

Birdies? I say. Ew, that’s where all the teachers drink!

Alex fires off another Sad Puppy Face shot, but at least this one’s new: him in a soft gray T-shirt, his hair sticking up all over the place and a plain wooden headboard visible behind him.

He’s sitting in bed too. Texting me. And over the weekend, when he was working on his classroom, he not only thought about me, but took the time to go find my old yearbook shot.

I’m grinning hugely now, and buzzing too. It’s surreal how much this feels like the early days of our friendship, when every new text seemed so sparkly and funny and perfect, when every quick phone call accidentally turned into an hour and a half of talking nonstop, even when we’d seen each other a few days before. I remember how, during one of the first of these—before I would’ve considered him my best friend—I had to ask him if I could call him back in a second so I could go pee. When we got back on the phone, we talked another hour and then he asked me the same thing.

By then it seemed silly to get off the phone just to avoid hearing pee hitting a toilet bowl, so I told him he could stay on the phone if he wanted. He did not take me up on it, then or ever, though from then on, I often peed mid–phone call. With his permission, of course.

Now I’m doing this humiliating thing, touching the picture of his face like I can somehow feel the essence of him that way, like it will bring him closer to me than he has been for two years. There’s no one to see it, and still I feel embarrassed.

Kidding! I reply. Next time I’m home, we should go get sloppy with Mrs. Lautzenheiser.

I send it without thinking, and almost immediately my mouth goes dry at the sight of the words on-screen.

Next time I’m home.

We.

Was that too far? Suggesting we should hang out?

If it was, he doesn’t let on. He just writes back, Lautzenheiser’s sober now. She’s also Buddhist.

But now that I haven’t gotten a direct reply to the suggestion, positive or negative, I feel an intense desire to push the matter. Then I guess we’ll have to go get enlightened with her instead, I write.

Alex types for way too long, and the whole time I’m crossing my fingers, trying to forcefully will away any tension.

Oh, god.

I thought I’d been doing fine, that I’d gotten over our friend breakup, but the more we talk, the more I miss him.

My phone vibrates in my hand. Two words: Guess so.

It’s noncommittal, but it’s something.

And now I’m on a high. From the yearbook photos, from the selfies, from the idea of Alex sitting up in bed texting me out of the blue. Maybe it’s pushing too hard or asking too much, but I can’t help myself.

For two years, I’ve wanted to ask Alex to give our friendship another shot, and I’ve been so afraid of the answer that I’ve never gotten the question out. But not asking hasn’t brought us back together either, and I miss him, and I miss how we were together, and I miss the Summer Trip, and finally, I know that there is one thing in my life that I still really want, and there’s only one way to find out if I can have it.

Any chance you’re free until school starts? I type out, shaking so much my teeth have started to chatter. I’m thinking about taking a trip.

I stare at the words for the span of three deep breaths, and then I hit send.

5

Eleven Summers Ago

OCCASIONALLY, I SEE Alex Nilsen around on campus, but we don’t speak again until the day after freshman year ends.

It was my roommate, Bonnie, who set the whole thing up. When she told me she had a friend from southern Ohio looking for someone to carpool home with, it didn’t occur to me that it might be that same boy from Linfield I’d met at orientation.

Mostly because I’d managed to learn basically nothing about Bonnie in the last nine months of her stopping by the dorm to shower and change her clothes before heading back to her sister’s apartment. Frankly, I wasn’t sure how she even knew I was from Ohio.

I’d made friends with the other girls from my floor—ate with them, watched movies with them, went to parties with them—but Bonnie existed outside our all-freshman squad-of-necessity. The idea that her friend could be Alex-from-Linfield didn’t even cross my mind when she gave me his name and number to coordinate our meetup. But when I come downstairs to find him waiting by his station wagon at the agreed-upon time, it’s obvious from his steady, uncomfortable expression that he was expecting me.

He’s wearing the same shirt he had on the night I met him, or else he’s bought enough duplicates that he can wear them interchangeably. I call out across the street, “It’s you.”

He ducks his head, flushes. “Yep.” Without another word, he